Some people asked me why I did not blog lately, well, the reason for me was simple: I didn't see the need to do so, till now.
Last Friday I headed with some great people to Brussels, and checked in at my hostel. Suddenly I walked into Claire Lotion, from #kde-nl fame. Later that night, after I found out that some heavy Japanese snorer was supposed to sleep underneath me, Claire and I were waiting for Marcus Furlong to show up. To go to the Fosdem beer event at the center of Brussels.
I decided to go on myself and to meet Claire and Marcus later on, and of course, got lost in the center of Brussels :-). After wandering around for 45 minutes I arrived at the Roy d'Espagne and met some good Dutch guys, and an Isreali KDE translator.
Later on during the night a group formed, and we decided to go drink more beer somewhere else. First we walked into an overcrowded Irish pub, but soon we got out of there because we couldn't reach the bar at all. We found a coffee-house and there I had a nice 'n' short conversation with Koos Vriezen, developer of Kmplayer, and with some cool Amarok developers.
Next day was very busy, with some other KDE people I've been running the booth, well, running and showing off a broken kde4 installation on my laptop. Dozens of people asked when KDE4 was going to be released! Unfortunately I was not able to attend any talks, so I sat down in the KDE devroom for an hour hacking on the wireless network.
At the end of the day we formed a group again, this time 16 people, including Anne-Marie Mahfouf (aka the teacher.. according to the waitresses :p), and decided to go eat somewhere. During the dinner we (me, Jos, Claire and Bram) had a very good conversation about politics, morality and Ireland with Marcus Furlong, the organizer of Akademy 2006.
Later on that night, when everyone went back to their hotels, Bram decided to stay in our hotel for some time to resume the discussion togheter with Claire, Marcus, Martin and Max. It got even that late that some of the hostel-crew asked us, a few times too much, to go to bed =).
Sunday morning I decided with myself that I was going to attend some of the KDE meetings/talks in the devroom that day. So, that morning I entered the KDE devroom, where the KDE-edu meeting was going on. Annma and the other people discussed some very good topics and IMHO educational software should get more attention and credit, because it is very important to a project like this. Later on that day, two breads later, Bart Coppens was preparing his talk about Krita, the image manipulation software of the Koffice project. Although his English pronunciation was sometimes a bit harsh, he did a extremely good job showing tonnes of powerful features in Krita, and gave a very realistic vision on the future. And he did some good live demos as well!
After that Jos Poortvliet presented KDE4 to a very overcrowded devroom, and did this very well. He collected a lot of juicy screenshots available and told tonnes about it. Later on someone suggested that he can be our spokesmen, and I think he is pretty capable of that! Thanks for the good work Jos!
After this I packed up and went back to the Netherlands by train. At about 22.30 I was back home again, completely exhausted. But it has been a very productive Fosdem! Next year I'm going to give a presentation!
Back home again work continues on SpreadKDE. After some confusing thoughts about it's goal and target audience we are completely back on track! Furthermore we hope a lot more people are going to get involved and attend our meetings! Jump in on irc, join the development website, and help us out providing constructive ideas and help filling it with content. Our next meeting is scheduled next Friday at 20.00 GMT in #spreadkde.